Offsets CAD, CAM related
Posted: Mon Aug 12, 2019 6:39 am
Win7pro 32bit Wininstaller Qcadpro 3.23.0
All, Cad's & CadCams,
As engraver I usually use conical shaped engraving cutters.
Cutting edge diameters down to 0.10mm and in special occasions even smaller.
I still get many errors while offsetting polys or entitiy strings.
I am very intrigued how Qcad can works around that for offsetting to cnc paths.
Prefering a 3rd party CAM included in my driver soft I don't need to create the paths offsets.
My CAM has it's own peculiarities, nevertheless it produces perfect workable paths and pockets for me.
Where I used all these offsets initially for was merely for presentation.
We usually get a drawing with splines-lines these days.
Everyone can draw sharp paths but we can't cut them with a round tool.
(see file, pockets at Eagle's neck)
I first solved presenting this with an approx lineweight.
These use a round pen but are limited in choise.
Doing so, the pockets are represented rounded but fatter too.
It was allready better to use an offset with 1/2 the lineweight.
Later it showed this isn't allways correct for inward and/or outward scharp/round edges.
Not correct or rather not preferable or unnecessary detailled.
Later I constructed a sceme with offsets and counter offsets.
Depending the result wanted chosing rounding or hard for the first operation and rounded for the second.
Super fine engraving points don't like to cut in a narrowing corner, semi-death stop and reverse.
Engraving is one, that takes time, re-dressing an engraver point is an whole other issue.
By chosing the offsetting distance a bit larger then the actual cutter radius in that depth we can try to keep as much scharp details as possible and have a continuous tangentially connected cutter path.
At present I use these offsets to export pockets to my CAM.
We learned not to set the spline approximation too high as in the example in this report:
https://qcad.org/bugtracker/index.php?d ... sk_id=1765
Ever since I am cleaning up offset paths.
On my wishlist are:
- Round Poly
- Select self-crossing
I recently set aside a drawing item in the file include as example and tried some offsets.
As I think this isn't as demanding as in the earlier report the results strike me.
These are not too tiny to detect.
Maybe this is a good example to digout where Qcad fails
Regards
All, Cad's & CadCams,
As engraver I usually use conical shaped engraving cutters.
Cutting edge diameters down to 0.10mm and in special occasions even smaller.
I still get many errors while offsetting polys or entitiy strings.
I am very intrigued how Qcad can works around that for offsetting to cnc paths.
Prefering a 3rd party CAM included in my driver soft I don't need to create the paths offsets.
My CAM has it's own peculiarities, nevertheless it produces perfect workable paths and pockets for me.
Where I used all these offsets initially for was merely for presentation.
We usually get a drawing with splines-lines these days.
Everyone can draw sharp paths but we can't cut them with a round tool.
(see file, pockets at Eagle's neck)
I first solved presenting this with an approx lineweight.
These use a round pen but are limited in choise.
Doing so, the pockets are represented rounded but fatter too.
It was allready better to use an offset with 1/2 the lineweight.
Later it showed this isn't allways correct for inward and/or outward scharp/round edges.
Not correct or rather not preferable or unnecessary detailled.
Later I constructed a sceme with offsets and counter offsets.
Depending the result wanted chosing rounding or hard for the first operation and rounded for the second.
Super fine engraving points don't like to cut in a narrowing corner, semi-death stop and reverse.
Engraving is one, that takes time, re-dressing an engraver point is an whole other issue.
By chosing the offsetting distance a bit larger then the actual cutter radius in that depth we can try to keep as much scharp details as possible and have a continuous tangentially connected cutter path.
At present I use these offsets to export pockets to my CAM.
We learned not to set the spline approximation too high as in the example in this report:
https://qcad.org/bugtracker/index.php?d ... sk_id=1765
Ever since I am cleaning up offset paths.
On my wishlist are:
- Round Poly
- Select self-crossing
I recently set aside a drawing item in the file include as example and tried some offsets.
As I think this isn't as demanding as in the earlier report the results strike me.
These are not too tiny to detect.
Maybe this is a good example to digout where Qcad fails
Regards